Moving On

Two friends passed away this week. Frank Garrett, not quite forty, was in a motorcycle accident and Tom Morphis from severely aggressive cancer. I don't know the details from either situation, but both friends went way back. Frank for 15 years or so, and I knew Tom going on 35 years as he was a friend of my parent's.

Several years ago I spoke and served as a pall-bearer at another friend's funeral. I was just 23 or so at the time, and though class mates from school had passed away from one thing or another, drugs, reckless driving, or both, I broke down in front of the congregation (something my mother will never let me forget) as a "newer, more personal meaning of death" really hit me.
I lost my grandmother when I was seven, but remember not feeling quite so ... lost, about it. She was aged and had been in pain. My brother and I were told that she was "in a better place" and there was no suffering there. As time went on, I lost all my grandparents. When my grandfather went, being afraid of losing control again, I went all stony and didn't say a word for the better part of a week. Later, after having moved here to Tokyo, both my mother's parents passed and I couldn't make it to either funeral. Everyone waited for me to come home to have my grandmother's "ceremony" and I read something there that my father thought might be inappropriate, but I read anyway and everyone wanted a copy of later.

I briefly run through these varied, stoic, embarrassing and lost feelings, to help me in my own head and heart, really. Pretty sure I've run the gamut of emotion, but then again, so far, I've been spared most of the horrors many have seen, things perhaps I will never know. The loss of a spouse, a child, and tragically, in a disaster, some people have lost everyone. O what people mean to us, and then, when they are gone! Lost loved ones are as stolen anchors, our chains still hanging in the ocean, dangling, void, as we ourselves begin to drift silently. Tears are words that the mouth cannot form.

Jack Lewis said when H died that he wondered why no one ever told him grief felt so much like fear. It truly does, but its also different for everyone and in every situation. Friends tell us it's "time to move on," but we cannot. We have no where to go. We are stuck here. Stuck without them.

I think I have an idea why God does it, lets us experience this awful, numbing pain. What loss the Father must have felt as Christ was separated from the Eternal Union, all because Adam and Eve turned away (thus turning us all away) - Christ purposefully gave of Himself to recreate that bond. The breaking is the remaking, the crushing renewal. Life is suffering, but He would take as much of it upon Himself so that we know as little of it as possible.

In the suffering we go through for a loved one, we get to know a part of God that we could not know otherwise. Lewis finally realized, at the end of A Grief Observed, that it was not a question of, 'God, where have you gone [in my suffering], but that this is what You are really like!' But inside that grief lies a secure comfort that we cannot know apart from our Maker.

Now, having lost two friends inside a week, and myself stronger with hope in our Lord, I think I may have returned to my seven-year-old mindset. For now anyway. I know God will crush me with more loss later. And that's fine, but I do hope it's later. In the meantime, stuck here without them, but thankfully with each other, it dawns on me that it's not we, but those who have died that are moving on.

And a grand move it is. Godspeed, Frank. Godspeed Tom.